This article on U.S. record industry vault losses appeared in
Billboard July 11 and 17, 1997.It was won both the first Billboard Donaldson Front Page Award and an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award.

Labels Strive to Rectify Past Archival Problems

BY BILL HOLLAND - Today, catalog preservation is more of a priority
for the major U.S. record companies than at any time in the history of the century-old industry. But these efforts come too late for untold numbers of recordings, old and not so old, that have been thrown away, mislaid, left behind in warehouses, and even sold for scrap.

Seventy one vault-wise sources who agreed to discuss the
issue with Billboard - sometimes on request of anonymity - said that while
most of the 3 million-plus heritage U.S. recordings owned by the major labels
are secure in vaults, enough legacy material has been lost over the years
to be disturbing.

Further, although it is difficult to estimate, they said
that maybe as many as a million more recordings from long-defunct or inactive
small indie labels lie unattended and gather dust in storage rooms, basements,
and garages all over the country - or have been destroyed or buried in landfills.

Material in all genres of music has been affected, they
said: rock, r&b, jazz, country, blues, classical, pop, "ethnic,"
spoken-word, and others - the entire gamut of this century's sound recordings.

Sometimes luck is on the side
of the heritage material. Sony Music Columbia reissues producer Michael
Brooks tells the story about saving never-released Louis Armstrong and His
Allstars master tapes from the trash bin.

"I was in the studio supervisor's office - this
was 1980 - and there were a pile of tapes, so I
started looking through them. They all had a big S on them, including
boxes clearly labeled 'Louis Armstrong - Unreleased Concert.' I said,
'What is this?' The guy said, 'All that's old stuff getting thrown
out to make room in the vault.' The S was for Scrap."

Brooks saved the tapes. His story is retold by veteran
Columbia producer George Avakian in the liner notes of the just-released,
magnificent, 2-CD Columbia/Legacy release, "Louis Armstrong--The Legendary Chicago Concert, 1956," released in May.

"Pick any label," said a vault-wise source. "Your whole article could be stories just about recordings owned by that one company that have been thrown out or missing. It's one of the industry's dirty little secrets."

Lost catalogue recording materials in the pre-tape era
include metal record manufacturing parts, disc acetates, test pressings
and disc copies, said the sources. In the tape era, the losses include both
monaural and stereo tape masters of singles and albums, safety copies, alternatetakes and multi-track session tapes.

Storage Costs, Short Memory

In past years, sources said, the biggest impediment to
proper archiving of older material has been constant administrative pressures
at all companies to economize on storage costs.

"In the '70s, there was
an order at MCA to the upstate New York vault to destroy all the metal
parts of the classic pre-1950 Decca, Vocalian and Brunswick sides," said a source. "But the order was quietly ignored by people at the vault who knew better, who later explained that there was plenty of space and no reason to do a systematic meltdown."

Most of those interviewed said that in recent years Sony
has led the industry in its fullscale efforts to update its archives, but
past stories about short-sighted decisions at the label clearly illustrate
why such efforts were initiated by the new software-conscious Japanese owner
of the CBS family label.

"I was working at CBS in the mid-70s," said
another former producer. "One day we got the word that some administrator
had decided that because of storage concerns, the mono tapes in the vault
should be thrown out. This meant not just mono mixes of stereo sessions,
but throwing out masters cut before the advent of stereo, okay?

"So the word gets out, and at lunchtime, there's
all sorts of people from the building out standing around the dumpsters
on East 52nd. St., and there are tapes, acetates, track sheets, session
notes, you name it, all over the street, and people trying to save this
or save that. Acetates don't like asphalt streets. Somebody finally cancelled
the order."

Pre-Sony CBS wasn't alone; similar measures at Liberty
and ABC, before those labels were acquired, respectively, by EMI and MCA
(now Universal Music Group) resulted in many mono-era tapes being thrown
out or destroyed, according to sources. Some pre-tape items were so badly
stored in the past at EMI's Capitol as to be useless.

"I was doing a big band series for Time-Life Records
in 1984 and we were doing Stan Kenton," Michael
Brooks recalled. "Capitol's transfer tapes were horribly distorted,
so I wanted to go back and use the original 16" lacquers (fragile
acetate first pressings). The lacquers were stored in a room in huge
piles, hundreds of them stacked flat on top of another, squashed, the
piles so high you'd have to use a ladder. All ruined."

Another major factor at all labels that impeded proper
care of older recordings, they said, was the pre-CD-era perception that
they were of negligible value and not viewed as ever producing revenue again.

"Nobody knew there'd be this interest in old recordings,"
said a source. "So there was this view that if they kept one copy,
any kind of copy, then they figured they were cool. So it was like, 'Why
keep those old metal parts? Why keep the mono when we've got reprocessed
stereo? Why keep these bulky multitrack session reels?' They just didn't
know any better."

"I saw CBS employees in the late '80s actually
using a band saw on tape reels, multitracks and masters of major artists,"
said Bob Irwin, a Sony producer and also owner of Sundazed Records.
"They were sawing the tapes off and saving the metal reels for scrap.
I argued with them and eventually got 30 or 40 reels away from those
people and brought them to someone who knew better."

Irwin said that the employees had been instructed to destroy
the tapes because "for every tape they got off the shelves, they saved
the company a nickel a month--that was the attitude."

All of those interviewed said such occurrences don't happen
anymore. "It's a different climate now," said a source. Because
when you get down to it, all a record company has of value, really, are
its artist contracts, its current release inventory, and its catalogue.

"And a corollary of that means taking care of the catalogue by keeping and archiving the best original source material."

Why is these best source material so important? "The
answer is simple," said an industry vet. "The others, copies and
such, don't sound as good. Copies sound duller. If you use the wrong tape,
like one equalized for the characteristics of vinyl format, forget it. Or
one where they used too much noise reduction on a disc-era reissue, it's
going to sound plain lousy."

A related reason for the self-inflicted seepage is the
turnover of company personnel, and the loss of "corporate memory."

"Well into the '60s and 70s, said an industry vet,
"most of the big companies had one person who'd been in charge of the
vault for eons, and that person knew where everything was. This was before
computers.

"Well, those people retired. And they sort of took
most of their knowledge with them, and many people remaining were just basically just clerks who wouldn't know Otis Redding from Otis Elevators."

"The turnover is unbelievable," said Joanne
Feltman, BMG VP, Business Affairs, and the executive primarily responsible
for BMG's vault updates. "That's one of the reasons for this project:
otherwise, you're just taking your chances that the person who knows about
your assets today knows about your assets tomorrow. Knows where it is, knows
it's in good shape, understands what product it's been on."

Sometimes there have been people working not just in the
vault library but also in the front line of company reissue programs who
didn't know their own label's heralded artists.

"There was this person
who worked in the EMI/Capitol reissues department--this is absolutely
true--who asked me ho Ricky Nelson and Jan and Dean were," said
a producer. How can you deal with that?"

One way to deal with the industry's inevitable turn of
the generational page was to bring in experts who did know the the company's
history and its artists.

Vault Detectives

In the mid-`80s. companies began hiring outside consultants
to scour and search their vaults. Often studio-wise and always passionately
knowledgable about particular musical genres (and even particular artists),
the freelancers would spend days and weeks searching company files, combing
through filthy warehouses checking out tape boxes--and often coming up with
the goods.

"One of the major problems to quick access,"
said a vault expert, "is that nobody at any company can possibly know
what's on every tape. If it isn't written accurately on the tape box, you
either forget it or play detective. That means getting down on your hands
and knees."

Given time, committment and a narrowed-down universe of
tape reels that expert knowledge brings, sometimes the work can pay off.

"That's how RCA found an alternate take for 'That's
All Right, Mama,' Elvis's first single for Sun
Records. Lost for, what, 33 years?" said a source. "They finally
figured to check the (matrix) numbers on tapes close to those of the
released recordings, and started searching. Believe me, none of the
boxes had 'Elvis' written on them, just numbers. Finally they found it."

Because of their knowledge and tenacity, and their successes,
many vault experts are now respected reissue roducers; others have become
part of the New Guard at label libraries.

The Losses are Industrywide

The historically largest and oldest companies, Sony's CBS/Columbia and BMG's RCA/Victor, founded in 1908 and 1901, have huge cornerstone
collections as well as later acquisitions - and have the largest and most
complete storage vaults of all the majors. BMG has an estimated 1.3 million
items (tapes, acetates, metal parts); Sony, more than 600,000, according
to sources.

Both have held onto the majority of their catalogue holdings
because of their sheer bulk. Sony's main vault is now in a state-of-the-art
Iron Mountain storage facility in upstate New York; BMG's is in a similar
underground facility near Slippery Rock in Western Pennsylvania.

Both companies have given over sizable budgets to complete
their computer-smart vault programs.

In addition to the size and age of their core inventory, the holdings in two companies' vaults have been fairly intact because no buyout deals over the decades have resulted in their vaults being moved around and haphazardly stored - thus more vulnerable to attrition - although they face the same problems as younger companies with their acquired labels. Buyouts and catalogue moves have become the achilles heel of all companies, but especially smaller companies.

The vaults of Universal Music Group (500,000 pre-tape
and tape items), EMI/Capitol (250,000 pre-tape and tape items) and PolyGram
(275,000 pre-tape and tape items), have also been greatly updated are also
held now at modern, hi-tech storage facilities.

These three companies' holdings form more of a mosaic of both their older core labels and the absorbed catalogues of smaller companies
they have bought.

Their older labels, such as Universal's Vocalion (1922)
(shared with Sony) and Decca (1934), EMI's Capitol (1942) and Polygram's
Mercury (1947) are also fairly intact. Polygram's vault, by the way, holds
the catalogue of more acquired companies - with more than 70 labels - than
any other major.

However, there is a downside to purchased catalogue - the
holdings of some of their acquired '50s-'60s-era rock and roll and r&b
labels, such as Universal/MCA's Chess family labels, show comparatively
more instances of missing or lost items, according to sources.

Warner Brothers Records (180,000 items, almost all tapes)
can also boast of a stable and temperature-controlled archive--but one,
unlike all the other majors, that has been in place almost since the founding
of the label in 1958.

Though part of the WEA family, the Atlantic Records catalogue
(120,000 items, mostly tapes), has always been stored separately from its
newcomer relative. Its famous catalogue dates back to 1948. Atlantic has
been the slowest of the companies to update its vault, which up until last
year was stored in conditions called "appalling" by many sources.

Old and New

"By and large, the older a recording is," said
one source, "the more likely the original source material is gone or
can't be found." Sometimes the reasons for consciously throwing away
material strain credulity.

"CBS used to employ one infamous person who had bizarre reasons for scrapping things," recalled reissue producer Brooks. "For example, she was shelving historic 16" test pressings. But she was also heaving all of the smaller 11" pressings into the trash. I asked her why. "I don't keep
little records," she told me.

The woman no longer works for the company.

Because of other decisions at pre-Sony CBS, usually based on storage concerns, many of the company's metal manufacturing parts for old Columbia and Okeh records are also gone, although many of the fragile lacquer disc acetates remain. "Columbia scrapped a lot of metal parts,"
explained a vet, "especially during the war years. RCA Victor did too,
but not as much. They have many more metal parts."

"RCA had their own storage buildings, so they didn't
have to worry about storage costs as much as other companies," said
a source. "That meant it was easier to just keep things."

However, there are a lot of fairly recent recordings at
all the companies that are also missing or lost, according to the sources.
"It's not just the 78 rpm-era things that are missing," said one
veteran of vault searches. "There are missing tapes by '60s and '70s
and even '80s artists too.

"Most things are there, you know. You can find them
if you search long enough, but some things are just gone. It depends on
how organized a vault library is. Archiving systems aren't keyed to true
or complete tape content."

On source familiar with the EMI-Capitol libraries admitted that "there are probably 10,,000 reels that nobody knows what's on them. And probably won't know - it isn't cost-effective. You know how much it would cost to play all those tapes and pay experts to find out what's there?"

The same goes for other labels. "Oh, yeah, there
are thousands and thousands of mystery reels at just about any company you
can name," said another vault expert. "I mean, most stuff is there,
but if the (tape) boxes are in piles, or unmarked, or mismarked, who knows?

BMG vault officials are among those new breed archivists who have developed a meticulous inventory system involving bar codes, with each item and matrix number notated. "But," added a source, "even that's dependent on what's written on a tape box, you know, the input. There's no way to know if there's an unlisted tune on a tape. There's no way to know if the Dolby tape is Dolby until you call for it and play it."

Sometimes the archivists and producers know of tapes,
but the company just chooses to sit on them. "Exploitation is a whole
other part of this," said a producer. "I know one label that has
40 reels of Sonny Rollins tapes recorded live in clubs in the Village during
the '60s. They (the jazz division) know they're there. And Rollins has told
people about them. But they're still sitting there."

Lost and Not Found

The Motown vault, now owned by PolyGram, is estimated to be about 30,000 tapes, and is "typical of a smaller company of that era," said one veteran whose first-hand observations were corroborated
by other sources. A peek at the Motown vault serves also as a description
of the holdings of other once-small labels that came to prominence in the
'60s.

"The good news in the case of Motown is that they
have most of the masters and most of the multitrack reels, but engineers
and producers taped over a lot of sessions. Tape was expensive. They'd get
a master and then use the rest of the reel for the next session. So there
aren't many alternate takes. There never were.

"Also, there are safeties or copies of probably everything
on so-called DM (lesser quality, backup) reels. They'd copy these copies
off when they sent the production masters to the pressing plant. Some are
on standard 1/4" tape, but 300 or so mono tracks are stripped onto
three-track reels, like 36 songs, 12 squeezed on one track, end to end.

"Some of the mixed masters are missing or hard to
find - I wouldn't say gone," said another source. "A lot of them
have been recovered over the years, those left stored at outside mastering
labs. Most acetates and metal parts (not as necessary in a tape-era vault)
are long gone, though."

"Other masters are just worn from use, so to get
the best sound, you have to remix," said a source. "And the problem
of remixing from the multitracks is that it's very hard to duplicate the
'Motown mix' sound--they had their own custom EQ boards, custom reverb.

"If you look hard enough, though, you can find a
substitute (of the era). Take Stevie Wonder's 'Fingertips': there might
be like 20 mixes, done at five sessions, all stored different places. They'd
do a song until they got it right. The problem is finding the right version."

All the sources said that the Motown vault has many unreleased
masters of both well-known and lesser-known artists, and many reels of live
shows. "They used to bring a three track machine down to the Twenty
Grand Club in Detroit to record on weekends for years."

Overall, the various sources said,
the Motown vault is in good shape. "But trying to find the definitive
master can be a problem," said a source. "Remember, the label
has gone through four owners, three cities, and seven addresses, if you
include Detroit."

"Other indies, especially smaller companies, had
the same 'tape-over-it' policy to keep costs down," said another source.
"But even RCA, Capitol, ABC, Mercury-Smash and Philips-Mercury had
policies in place throughout the '60s and '70s of reusing, scrapping or
not storing store multitrack session tapes, and just keeping mixed masters.

"Sometimes, tapes just end up missing," said a vault vet.. "They're either mislabeled, or they just can't be found, like Bob Dylan's 'Nashville Skyline' album--Sony's still searching for it. They have safety, but it's a copy. The good news is that they've found (Dylan's) 'Blood on the Tracks' master now. It had been mislabled when it was shipped years back from Nashville to New York."

Occasionally, companies buy labels and then later discover
that the recordings were never delivered.

"After Island was sold to PolyGram in 1989,"
recalls an insider, "somebody finally said, 'well, where are the tapes?
We can't find them.' These were tapes from the famous Compass Point studios
in the Bahamas.

"So PolyGram called Compass and were told they'd
been shipped to New York. Eventually they discovered they'd been held up
at U.S. customs in Miami. Boxes and boxes of reels, stored somewhere at
the docks - for a year. Some major '70s and '80s albums too: Grace Jones,
Black Uhuru, Third World, B-52s, the aborted album project with James Brown
and Sly and Robbie. They finally got them back, and luckily, they played
allright."

"It happens all the time. At PolyGram, there are
missing multitracks by Cream - lost somewhere along the line between when
Atlantic sold them to Polydor, apparently," another source said. "MCA
can't find masters by Three Dog Night, The Grass Roots. Sony can't find
some Bang label multitrack masters. On the other hand, somebody opened a
mystery box at BMG the other day and found some unreleased Hot Tuna. It
happens all the time in the industry."

The engineers who worked with Steely Dan on transferring the group's "Royal Scam" album tapes to
digital in 1982 for eventual CD release says that MCA couldn't find
the analog master for one whole LP side of the album..

"These guys searched and searched and finally had
to use an (earlier) backup digital copy for that side of the album. They
barely got the tape to play--some clown had apparently tried to play it
on an analog machine. The edges were all wrinkled There's a photo somewhere
of the engineers holding the tape down on the recording heads with a Q-Tip
so it would track properly."

Horror stories

One of the most devastating vault losses in modern industry
history occurred in February, 1978 in a fire in a non-air-conditioned Atlantic
Records storage facility in Long Branch, N.J.

The warehouse fire destroyed virtually all of Atlantic's unreleased masters, alternate takes and sessions tapes by artists who had recorded for the label and its offshoots throughout
its classic 1948-1969 first golden era.

Thousands of performances by nearly a hundred of America's
most acclaimed r&b, soul, pop and jazz artists were lost in the fire.
According to several sources, between 5,000 to 6,000 reels of tape were destroyed or damaged. Just a handful of the artists names reads like a short-form
Who's Who in Mid-Century American Music.

To compound the dimension of the losses, most of the material - all
but the first few years - had been recorded in stereo. Atlantic was an industry
leader in recording in the new mode as early as 1952.

Several former senior executives and staffers at Atlantic told Billboard that news of the fire was kept quiet. "It was very hush-hush;
I'd ask for tapes and they'd just say 'they're not there,'' remembered one
producer. "I didn't find out until a year later."

In a few instances, reissue producers and archivists have
discovered a few of the lost tapes, reels that had been removed years before
from the warehouse and not returned or perhaps consciously squirreled away.

"When we were doing the (Rhino-Atlantic) John Coltrane
box set," said industry veteran and former Atlantic producer Joel Dorn,
who now runs 32 Records, "they told us all the session reels and outtakes
were gone, supposedly destroyed in the fire. I'd heard the stories. But
I came over to the old warehouse to look anyway. Eventually, some young
man who'd been watching me grumble said, ' You know, I think I might have
seen something in that area over there,' pointing to high shelf. Up on the
shelf were reels piled up, semi-alphabetical.

"So I searched through all these boxes and finally
found what I was hoping for--supposedly destroyed alternate takes from (the
seminal 1959 Coltrane album) 'Giant Steps.'

"Now, by all rights, they should have been stored
in that warehouse," Dorn said. "I found other amazing things,
like Bobby Darin's first Atco demo of 'Dream Lover' (circa 1957), with Fred
Neil playing guitar."

Some of the other recovered lost treasures since recovered by Atlantic archivists include unreleased masters, alternate takes and rehearsals
by Ray Charles, tunes by R&B Foundation awardee Van "Piano Man"
Walls, and outtakes by jazz legends Ornette Coleman, Lenny Tristano and
Lee Konitz.

Luckily, Atlantic had stored its master tapes in New York
at the time of the '76 fire.

MGM Records also suffered the ravages of a vault fire,
according to several sources. The fire broke out in the MGM's Hollywood,
Cal. warehouse in 1972 . Although most master tapes were spared, again,
many session reels, alternate takes and most master acetates for many MGM
recordings, as well as those for the Verve Records family (MGM had bought
the jazz label in the '60s), were destroyed or badly damaged due to water
damage incurred in extinguishing the the fire. The damage was then exacerbated
by emergency storage of the material for a period of months in an open shed.

"It was kind of one plague after another," said
Verve research archivist Ben Young, "for some of those tapes that (because
of ownership changes) had to go from the Verve East Coast holdings to the
West Coast and then back to White Plains, N.Y. in the '70s and '80s and
now are staged in Edison (N.J.).

"Sometimes it's a desperate search for every little
scrap that sometimes pays off in full," Young said, "but more
often has no payment at all."

A prime example of the problems a reissue producer faces
in the face of such a disaster appears in the award-winning 1992 "The
Complete Billie Holiday on Verve." Producer Phil Schaap's audio notes
list more than 30 damaged or missing Holiday tracks (for which disc dubs
or airchecks were used) and writes of "the absence over time from the
vaults of more than 90% of the original session reels."

The most spectacular case of wholesale vault trashing
is the decision by RCA in the early '60s to demolish its warehouse in Camden,
N.J. The warehouse, according to collectors and industry veterans, held
four floors of catalogue product, pre-tape-era material ranging from metal
parts, acetates, shellac disc masters and alternate takes to test pressings,
master matrix books and session rehearsal recordings.

Several days before the demolition, officials from French
RCA gained permission to go through the building and withdraw whatever material
they could carry for their vinyl "Black and White" jazz reissue
series. A few American collectors were also allowed in the building to salvage
any items they could carry out.

A few days later. as dozens of RCA officials and collectors
stood on a nearby Delaware Bridge, demolition experts ignited the
dynamite charges. Eyewitnesses said they saw "clouds of debris,
black and metal chunks flying out the windows" of the collapsing
building.

The building wreckage was then bulldozed into the Delaware
River. A pier was built on top of the detritus.

"Was it a case of literally dynamiting away our cultural
heritage, or was it nobody's business but a private property of a company
that had made a business decision that made sense to them at the time?"
asked a young archivist, one of several who have confirmed the story with
older collectors who were present at the demolition. "The problem is,
it was both. There's always that tug."

In a more recent example of vault abuse, employees at
a major label received storage boxes containing hundreds of tapes apiece
shipped from a closed-down older storage facility. They then discovered
that unfortunately, the tapes had spent "some time" soaking in
water. "The boxes," notes the observer, "bore obvious high
tide lines, high water mark lines."

"There are those kind of stories at all the labels,"
said one veteran who has prowled the vaults of large and small companies.
"Things thrown out, sold for scrap, just mislaid, lost. And that 'tape
over it' policy to save a few bucks."

Other sources told of watching company personnel grabbing
a recorded tape off the shelf in lieu of a blank tape to make a quick copy
of something else.

"They'd grab a box, and go, 'hmm, so-and-so,' and
because they were lazy or didn't know any better, would use it,'" said
one producer. "I've seen it happen more than once."

Several sources said that in the early '80s, they witnesses
MCA employees, under a directive to make vault
tape copies, actually taped over master tapes by artists such as Patsy
Cline and Roy Orbison.

Said another source: "Somebody needed some spare
tape to make a dub, okay? So they got this box off the shelf and spooled
off tape and started copying on it. I look at the box later and it was labeled
'Gary Usher--Outtakes.' I'm thinking, Jeez...."

Erasing Elvis, Pitching Out Presley

Elvis may have been the king,
but for RCA bean counters in the days before BMG took over the company,
he was just a name on pesky tape reels taking up valuable space.

"In the '70s, they just threw out some Elvis material."
said a source. "A storage issue, apparently. They were multitrack session
reels from his '60s movies. Those ended up on a (counterfeit) bootleg."

Presley's first sessions in Los Angeles, cut in 1957,
also went missing, but this time, enterprising BMG reissue execs, 30 years
later, tracked down copies by contacting Bones Howe, one of the recording
engineers who taped the sessions at Radio Recorders along with Thorne Nogar.
Luckily for the label, they'd stored them away in the studio library.

And even more luckily, Howe saved them after finding them
in the trash after a "studio cleanup" three years later.

"I walked in the back door of the studio one day,"
Howe recalled. "It was in 1960. The dumpster was filled with tapes.
I went, 'my God, I worked on a lot of these things.'

"I asked the supervisor, and he said that the studio
had cleaned out the library, and they had called the record companies but
there was no response. So he said, 'go ahead, take 'em before the dumpster
truck pulls up.'

"I went through all these tapes and got all the things
I'd recorded, and digging through them, I found the Elvis reels, and sealed
them all up in boxes and stored them in my garage. They were with me through
the '80s.

Even better, in addition to several mono reels, Howe had
found tapes of the entire session cut on a two-track stereo machine that
served as a backup tape recorder rolling at the sessions. (There were thought
to be no pre-Army, Elvis stereo recordings).

"Now, RCA had the mono EQ'd masters, but even back
in the late '60s, things at the vault had gotten way out of control, tapes
piled everywhere, so they couldn't really find anything. After Elvis died,
all these compilations started coming out," Howe explained.

"Finally in the mid'80s, RCA called and said 'we
hear you've got these tapes," and I said, 'yes, I do.' In the end we
negotiated a price and I sold the tapes back to RCA. The (audio tapes for)
the 1968 TV 'Comeback Special' too."

Perhaps the most amazing Found Elvis Tapes story is how
a record company boss in Germany discovered the long-missing tapes of Prelsey's
first 1956 RCA recording session in Nashville. For decades, they were thought
to no longer exist.

A few years back, Bear Family Records in Hambergen, Germany
licensed tons of RCA Hank Snow material from BMG for one of its admirable
multi-volume, multi-CD sets for the European market.

As Bear Family owner Richard Weize and his engineer
sat in the studio listening to one of the many
Snow tapes, they could hear something "annoying" running backwards.
When they flipped the reel over, they were astounded. They'd stumbled
upon a previously-unknown alternate take of the 1956 RCA Elvis hit,
"I Want You, I Need You, I Love You."

Weize immedately called the well-known Elvis reissue expert
Ernst Jorgensen, who confirmed Weise's guess. Further, the alternate take
was not known to exist. Jorgensen immediately called BMG in New York, and
ordered from the vaults all Nashville tapes bearing subsequent matrix numbers
recorded soon after the Presley session.

After a thorough search, he found five more lost Presley
items from the sessions - unreleased, alternate-take performances sessions
of "I Was the One," "I've Got a Woman" and "I'm
Counting On You," as well as two alternate takes of "Heartbreak
Hotel," his first 1956 breakthrough single.

Some of the discoveries were included in the recent BMG "Elvis '56" release; the others will appear in a new four-CD "Platinum - A Life in Music" box set that includes recently unearthed Presley material - sessions,
TV shows, rehearsals and even a pre-Sun Records acetate - to be released
June 17 (Billboard, May 24).

In a case still making headlines, a '70's-era directive
of now-closed Columbia Records studio in Nashville led to the label giving
away a small audio gold mine.

The studio had a policy allowing employees to cheaply purchase reels of tape "not used in the production of specific albums."
An employee at the studio thought he'd gotten a good deal on a lot of what
he thought was simply bulk used tape--2,200 reels, to be precise.

Ownership of the stash has passed through several hands.
Amid the detritus on the tapes, according to the current owners, are unreleased
studio and live masters, alternate takes and safety masters by icons such
as Louis Armstrong, Buddy Holly, Frank Sinatra, Hank Williams, Sr., Johnny
Cash, Elvis Presley, Patsy Cline, Tony Bennett, Bob Dylan and several dozen
other well-known artists.

Missing In Action

Occasionally producers or engineers in the past have snipped
out a master for use and forgot to log the change, causing problems. Sometimes
a crook snips out a master. Years later, archivists and vault searcher reissue
experts discover that a master has been removed. One source said he'd seen
masters by Buddy Holly, Jackie Wilson and others "cut right out of
the three-track masters reel."

In the digital age, sometimes missing tapes means even
bootlegging the bootleggers. "Some of the original three and four track
masters by the Byrds were missing, probably stolen," a source said.
"So when Sony put out its (recent) Byrds collection, they used the
tapes they could find, but then ended up transferring the tracks they were
missing from an Italian bootleg CD box set that contained the very material
that had been stolen from them. And there are many more examples."

Tales of the 80s & 90s

The closing of many New York
recording studios and mastering labs such as Bell Sound, Allegro, Belltone,
Sigma Sound and the Record Plant added to the lore of lost tape stories.
Most companies left session tapes and even masters at these studios.

"Sony bought the late Bert Berns' label Bang in the
early 80s, but it wasn't until about 1990 that they realized they had not
taken delivery of the masters," recalled Bob Irwin, a producer for
Sony and owner of Sundazed Music. "The McCoys' 'Hang on Sloopy' masters,
things like that, you know.

"So they called me and I said, well, first of all,
try calling Ilene Berns, the widow, down in Nashville or Memphis," Irwin said. "So they did, and she said, 'Oh, sure, it's all in my basement.
You want me to send it up?'" Mrs. Berns had responded to the call from
Bell to pick up tapes.

When The Record Plant went out of business, CBS (now
Sony) was one of a number of major labels that had kept tapes there and
never took delivery of their masters, according to Irwin.

"Eventually, a couple of guys from Wehauken, N.J.
bought the studio and everything that was left--thousands of reels--including
all these masters and multi-tracks," he said. "Now, they didn't
have any interest in selling the tapes illegally; instead, they called the
companies and said, okay, come get your stuff; you can buy it back. Price
was something like $20 a reel, storage fees really, because they'd put up
money to buy it all and then they had to haul it and store it.

"So Sony sent us and we drove to Wehawken and
were shown a loft with thousands of multitrack
session reels on shelves," Irwin recalled. "From Springsteen
on down...Heart, Ted Nugent, on and on. We went back to the label
and convinced them to buy them back because, you know, some of the tapes
were priceless.

"But while I was there at this loft, I kept seeing
all these tapes from other companies," said Irwin. "Artists on
every single major label. I even called a guy at a label and told him, hey,
all so-and so's multi-tracks, all the mixdown reels, they're all here! He
never showed.

"Here's the kicker though." Irwin added. "Years
later, I ran across one of the guys who'd bought the tapes out of the Record
Plant and he told me that only a few other labels other than Sony had ever
responded to his calls. Nobody else came. So he told me that all those masters
and multi-tracks went unclaimed and went into the dumpster."

A source at Warner Brothers Records also told Billboard:
"Oh, we flew to New York and went out to New Jersey where these new
owners had stored all these tapes. They just asked us for storage fees.
We took possession of a lot of tapes that belonged to us. Things like Madonna
tapes on Sire."

However, former Record Plant co-owner Chris Stone, now
head of the pro-audio association World Studio Group, said that he doesn't
believe record companies were unresponsive--at least when the New York studio
was still operational. "We did store a lot of tapes, but in most cases,
the labels were metilculous (about retrieving tapes) and if they didn't
want something back, it was because it was a copy or a safety they already
had and they didn't need a fourth copy. So I don't believe in the premise."

Stone said he was not aware of the instances mentioned
above. "Don't tell me because I don't think I want to know," he
said. "I'd be real cautious about telling these stories. The companies
won't like it."

Advent of the CD Brought Changes

In the case of the major label companies, especially those
which bought out smaller companies, the importance of a coherent storage
and preservation policy didn't become clear until the advent of the CD and
the economic advantage of properly reissued material.

EMI officials took their modernizing plan very seriously.

Three and a half years after the company modernized its
Los Angeles vault and updated Capitol's vault database, the master plan
also meant a move of all post-'70s session reels and alternate take tapes
last summer to a custom-built vault facility in New Jersey, far from possible
L.A. earthquake damage, according to Peter Brooks, EMI-Capitol's Senior
VP Logistic Development.

The moving day scenario of the EMI-Capitol session tapes
was reminiscent of the film "Road Warrior." According to Brooks:
"We loaded 50 regrigerated, articulated trucks, sent them in four convoys
across the nation, using different routes, staggered eight hours apart,
along with chaser cars with guards. They only made gasoline stops."

In the years before the update, however, Capitol stored many of their tapes not only in the Capitol Tower building and a distribution warehouse but in un-airconditioned little rooms under the stage of the nearby Pantages Theater at Hollywood and Vine, according to several sources. "They
were there until 1987," said a former employee, "until we got
them out. No one at the company knew what was there, because it had been
done a decade before."

Capitol wasn't the only label to store its holdings in
dubious storage facilities. Until last year, the master tapes of Atlantic's
valuable family of labels spent years in several different locations, including
one described by a half-dozen industry insiders as a dirty, unorganized,
and unsecured warehouse on New York's West Side.

"The front door emergency exit on 16th. Street
was propped open with a brick," said a source.
"I walk in and I don't see a soul. Just shelves and shelves of reels
of Atlantic artists. I go, 'Hello? Hello?' Finally I find a guy sitting
with his feet up who didn't see me come in. I thought, what if I was
a bootlegger?

Atlantic finally initiated reforms last year, but it has
taken until this spring to move the library to its new modern vault.

New guardianship by conglomerates has helped the updating,
but it also has its downside. "People have to remember that the 'Recorded
Music Division' is just one part of what a big multinational company is
about. Most of the money that gets to the music division goes where the
revenue stream is the biggest, which is current releases," explained
another veteran of the vaults. "So you constantly have to fight to
make them understand the importance of their holdings.

Pilferage: Liberating or Stealing?

Pilferage of the vaults prior to the updated vault programs,
has also been a problem at all labels over the years.

While there are isolated cases of ripped-off recordings
going directly to bootleggers, much of the pilferage has come from passionate
music fans who felt (in some cases, with good reason) that unless they
"liberated" material they'd be thrown out, destroyed or left to
gather dust.

The sources were not in agreement on the pilferage issue.

"You can call it whatever you want, but it's stealing,
period," said one. "The point is not
that a label was sitting on an artist's material or not. Even if they
choose to ignore it or throw it out, it's their decision. It all belongs
to them. That's the point."

All of the sources for this article said they were surprised
there hasn't been more pilferage over the years. One suggested that "there
isn't a (collector) market for multi-tracks. Most people don't have or can't
afford the equipment at home to play them back. Even 1/2" or half-track
15 ips masters. That's why a lot of the theft has been acetates or test
pressings. Test pressings are big in the collector market. People can show
'em off, play 'em at home."

Several sources confirmed that years back, near-complete
runs of 78-era test pressings by '20s and '30s jazz and blues artists on
the Brunswick, Vocalian and Decca label were stolen out of the MCA warehouse
in upstate N.Y. by someone who bribed a night guard.

"There's another case," said an insider, "where
a guy stole the actual metal parts of an old Columbia classical recording,
got a few records pressed somewhere, then destroyed the metal parts to insure
the value of his 'collectible.' Nice, huh?"

Most bootleggers in the LP and CD era haven't been vault
plunderers. Instead, by and large they released albums of material taped
at live shows or off the radio.

While there are instances of "boots" that are
actually counterfeits of unreleased material recorded by labels--artists
such as the Beatles, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, the Beachboys and Prince
are the most popular--much of the unauthorized material used by the bootleggers
came not directly from the vaults but from other loophole sources such as
dubs made--and often left behind--at mastering labs for someone within the
artist's organization. "All it takes is a friend to pass one on to
a friend who passes it on," explained a source.

Some reissue producers have connection to the collector
community, and call on them when the vaults come up empty on tracks for
a project.

"There are people all over who have tapes that
were thrown out in the trash," said the source.
"They're not making boots; just holding on to them.. You can lay
your hands on a lot of things. It just takes time. Companies don't
have the time; they can't be bothered."

Often reissue producers and library archivists develop
Sherlock Holmes deductive powers and follow the trail of clues and rumors
about a missing track back to a suspect who has actually stolen tracks,
and confront them.

"Sometimes they'll contact us; they'll want to sell
it back to us; othertimes, they'll give it back," said one veteran.
"A few of them getting up in years approach us, bring them back--guilty
consciences."

Said another: "We know there are some collections
(of stolen material) belonging to older people that were sold or even given
to places like the Library of Congress for a tax credit, collections that
have rare stuff in it--masters, acetates."

For a number of reasons, record companies have chosen
not to prosecute those they believe have stolen material, say insiders,
even though in some cases, they know the alleged culprit, even when that
the person is or was in possession of the recordings.

Why no prosecutions? According to those interviewed, they
say that it is difficult for prosecutors to prove theft. Second, a court
case might well reveal that vault security at the time was insufficient
or non-existent.

CDs Changed Corporate Thinking

As the first inkling of a new consumer interest in catalogue
material emerged in the years of initial CD reissues, companies initially
began producing CDs that were often haphazardly produced. Observant listeners
and music writers discovered that some of the packages had poor audio and
sometimes did not even include the hits or the music they remembered.

"There was a bit of a consumer revolt," said
one veteran, "because many vaults were disorgzanized and stuff was
missing, so on some of these first reissues they often used whatever people
could easily find--wrong takes, butchered, edited versions, introductions
chopped off, second and third generation copies, all kinds of travesties.
All of a sudden, fans and audiophiles were complaining to the companies,
'Hey, what the hell is this?' That's when things began to change for the
better."

More Lost and Found

Said one vault detective. "Like in any business,
there are guys who do the same basic thing as I do, which is finding tapes
and preparing reissues, and we're always on the phone to each other--'you
have any idea where such and such might be?' Lots of times, they'll find tapes in a warehouse of one record company that belong to another company."

According to a source, a tape believed to be the master
to Billy Joel's first album, "Cold Spring Harbor," recently turned
up in the Excello vault, owned by AVI, in Nashville. The tape was sent back
to Billy Joel's people.

One veteran said that in the 1950s and '60s, when a now-deceased
employee from the defunct Chess label (now at Universal's MCA) would collect
Chess tapes mastered at Chicago's Universal Recording Studio, "he would
also grab any other tape that wasn't nailed down.

"When the Chess vault been moved to Nashville,
I saw rows and rows of these unmarked tapes, and
I asked the guy what they were. 'That's the '"Universal file,"'
he said. God only knows how many tapes that belong to other small Chicago
companies of that era that might be in the Chess vault."

Said another vault-hound: "I've found tapes in every
imaginable place, not just vaults. In basements, even unheated garages.
Unmarked boxes, no track sheets, the works.

"We found the tapes for Leiber and Stroller's indie
labels, Daisy, Red Bird, Tiger, Blue Cat masters, in the old Brill Building.
In an unoccupied room on top of a file cabinet by an open window. Exposed
to New York summers and winters since probably 1963. They were like linguini
in the boxes. Believe it or not, once we re-wound them and worked on them,
the tapes played fine."

Scrapping for the war effort, and throwing out "junk".

The stories of labels dumping
or junking material considered extraneous or worthless extend back into
the Depression era. Many metal parts in the catalogues of such now-famous
1920s blues labels as ARC, Paramount and Vocalian were tossed even before
the companies were bought by the larger companies.

During World War II, Columbia and RCA both donated metal
parts to scrap drives to help defeat the Axis powers.

Even before Woulds War II, according to those familar
with the company's past,, RCA masters by blues giants such as Charlie Patton,
Blind Blake, Ma Rainey, Skip James and Bukka White were destroyed. In some
vases, the matrix numbers of those tossed-away sides were assigned to new,
Chinese-language records.

"After the War," one historian also said,
"an RCA executive came upon a number of unissued
sides by Blind Willie McTell, virtually unknown and forgotten at that
time. He ordered the sides thrown out. The official was later fired - not
because he'd destroyed unreleased records by a blues master, but because
he dumped company property 'without approval.'"

Although the historians said that hundreds and hundreds
of unreleased masters by blues and folk artists--Blind Lemon Jefferson and
Charlie Poole among them--are gone, junked or sold for scrap during the
depression even before those labels went belly up, some recordings of that
era survived through the years because they were not of interest to anyone
and were stored and uncatalogued until they were stumbled upon decades later.

Scrapping isn't relegated to the the old days. According
to source, there was also wholesale metal parts scrapping at Columbia's
old Bridgeport, Conn. warehouse during the late '50s, until the late Columbia
executive John Hammond got wind of it and put a stop to it.

Buyouts Equal Seepage

Most of those interviewed agreed that there is also more
loss of vintage material on smaller labels that released singles originally
aimed at '50s and '60s era teens, especially those which have been bought
and sold throughout the years, and their vaults moved from one or more cities.

The vaults of modern jazz labels of the '50s and '60s,
originally aimed at a more sophisticated LP listeners, have been luckier.
The famous modern jazz vaults of Blue Note, Prestige, Riverside, Pacific
Jazz and others are mostly intact, a condition largely due to the beliefs
of the original owner of the importance of the music, and the respect accorded
the material by the companies which later bought the catalogue.

"You can overdo being kind to jazz labels, though,"
said veteran jazz producer and former Riverside Records co-owner Orrin Keepnews,
who said he knew that when he was in session with Theolonious Monk, he knew
he was in the presence of "someone and something" important..

"This did not necessarily lead me to think I'd
better preserve every scrap of tape with this man's
sound on it, because number one, not only weren't we thinking of CDs
(in the '50s) but we were not thinking particularly of reissues - we
did not think of what we were doing as having immortality."

Even among the tapes of the well-cared-for Prestige label,
now owned by Fantasy, there are few alternate takes. "Maybe there's
five or six alternate takes in the whole catalog," said a source. There
are masters missing, according to producer Ed Michel, who spent two years
working at Fantasy, cataloguing the 12,000-plus reels in the multi-label
Prestige/Milestone/Riverside/Galaxy jazz section of the vault.

"I know some of the early Miles Davis masters are
gone," Michel said. "Prestige had been using (record) dub tape
sources for some of those tracks for years.

What About Tomorrow?

Most of the 65 experts interviewed for this article expressed
concern about the future of archiving recorded sound. First, they were
concerned that with the CD reissue boom of the late '80s and early '90s
apparently leveling off, funding for archiving and preservation efforts
at some companies are already becoming a lesser priority. And they are also
worried about reliable preservation in a digital universe.

Deteriorating Digital?

Ominously, there are already examples throughout the industry
of digital masters that are showing signs of deterioration to add to the
preservation problem, sources told Billboard, especially when the companies
have not "backed up" their digital tapes with analog tape safety
masters, as recommended by engineering and archival groups such as AES and
NARAS.

A recent random sample conducted by a major label of more
than 100 digitally stored tapes, tranferred a recently as three years ago,
indicate that there is deterioration--dropouts or mechanical breakdowns
--in 10% of the sampled tapes.

Because of a "suggestion" at Sony, in place until the mid-'80s when it was challenged, that recommended scrapping analog tape masters once they'd been transferred to digital, such news about deterioration
is of particular concern. For the analog recordings that remain, Sony is
using both the digital format to back up its analog recordings and also
continuing to make analog to analog copies

"We know discs can last 100 years. We know (analog)
tapes so far have lasted nearly 50 years," said one well-known engineer.
"But we don't know how long recordings stored in digital format will
last."

Said another engineer: "We're beginning to discover
that the way digital tapes transport mechanisms are constructed, some are
prone to curl or crease or not track correctly. In analog, you can correct
some of that. In digital, you've got a real problem. You can't edit-- the
information is just gone."

Another concern is that in many cases, the digital format
has created a situation where there might not be anything a producer in
the future can lay hands on other than the production master handed in to
companies today.

"Right now, in many cases, there's no such thing as
a master and a session reel as we knew it in the analog days. What's handed
to the record company is a so-called production master, a digital U-Matic.
A final two-track that you can't remix. That's bad enough, but in many cases,
that production master was culled from tracks done by a number of individual
producers at studios all across the country. Nobody hands in all the (digital)
session tapes. Well, what happens in 10 or 20 years and you want to go back
to the session tapes?

The Right Stuff

Another problem concerning archivists is the need for
label execs to recognize that a lot of hard-to-find, now-obsolete recording
and playback equipment of previous eras is often needed for quality remastering
and reissue projects.

"Vaults and studios need all kinds of vintage equipment,
and the knowledgable staff to run all of it," said one engineer. "If
you don't have trained people who care, and you put a tape on a machine
that hasn't been cleaned or correctly aligned, what you're doing is helping
to ruin the tape."

Another engineer rattled off a long but important necessary
in an industry that has had to change formats to keep up with technology
that began a century ago with primtive platters and never looked back.

"Just to mention a few things - starting with pre-tape
material, you need 78 rpm turntables with variable speed, a dozen different
styli, because companies didn't cut the same.

"From the tape era, you need to have - or have the
budget to lease - a tube-driven, mono, full track machine, and also the
half track and quarter track machines that were used through the years.
And you'll need good 45 rpm and 33 rpm turntables and styli.

"For the very early stereo, you need a staggered-head,
two-track binaural stereo machine. Then there were the in-line-head, two-track
machines. Then the more recent 4, 8,16 and 24 track machines from the '60s,
'70s and '80s. You've got to have this equipment. Otherwise, how are you
going to be able to play the stuff?" he said. "It's useless to
have these space age vaults if you don't have the gear to play the stuff.

"Look, even the early digital machines, they're obsolete
now," he added. "Will companies be smart enough to have the outmoded
machines around in ten years? I hope so. Without it, in the future, you're
going to be in deep doodoo."

There is also the separate issue of remastering, according to preservation experts, and the requirements of educated and informed employees.
"Maybe you've got the right machine, but some people out there, I'll
tell you, they know what they're doing, but some - you can't believe they
let them near a studio - don't have a clue what a mess they're making.

"To get a good sound on a reissue, you also have
to keep in mind all kinds of factors. You should know the characteristics
of the original tape stock, how it performed. You have to factor in things
like the different rolloff EQ they used in the earely days of hi-fi, like
the RIAA and NAB settings, all of that '50s mumbo-jumbo.

"If you play back a '70s analog 16-track tape on
a modern machine, it won't sound the same as on a machine from the era.
Say you have a late '50s classic like Miles Davis's 'Kind of Blue.' If you
don't transfer (in the remastering process) using an old tube three-track
machine, it won't sound right. If you use the wrong A to D (analog to digital)
converters, it won't sound right. But sometimes people at labels trying
to keep on schedule are like, 'whatever.'

"Unknowledgable staff is sometimes a problem,"
admitted another engineer. "Some are making decisions to use flat transfer
masters for reissues and they don't realize that flat means flat, and that
the new master has to be tweaked and punched up, you know, like the word
says, 're-mastered,' and done in a manner so hopefully they sound like the
era. Appropriate.

"For example, I've seen people who should have known
better using the wrong tapes for CD reissues," he added. "Using
tapes that were EQ'd for vinyl. Said so right on the box. The results, of
course, sound like garbage."

Examples of this kind of malappropriation are the Jimi
Hendrix CD releases by both Reprise and MCA that were on the market until
recently, according to engineer Ed Kramer, who worked on Hendrix recording
dates in the '60s and '70s and was instrumental in the two-year project
of tracking down Hendrix masters for the series of landmark remastered albums
in versions approved by the Hendrix estate. That series has received high
acclaim for sound quality of most of the material -

"When we were doing research for the project,
we checked (company) records and went, 'oh, no,
look here, good lord, it can't be--they've been using EQ-d copies!' he
said. "Of course, they sounded bloody awful--dull, pinched, no
high end. Unnatural."

Kramer also says that one of the MCA releases (apparently
cut from a copy made on a machine that ran slow) was one-eighth of a tone
from true pitch.

He also said many of the masters were missing from the
vault. Most were eventually tracked down and, in some cases, " bought
back from individuals," who had ended up with tapes left behind at
recording studios.

As a result of the detective work and the long hours of
careful remastering, Kramer was able to make sure that the new releases
sounded better than any previous Hendrix reissues--"like a veil had
been lifted from the speakers."

Nevertheless, about 15% of the material still had to be
taken from sources other than the master tapes. "We just took the time
to make them sound good--something that record companies don't bother to
do."

Another veteran engineer said that he knew of several
labels that recently had mistakenly used an analog master for a digital release and a digital master for a premium vinyl release destined for "hi-end
vinyl junkies." The result? "They both sounded awful and they
had to be completely redone. So you've got to use your head. And you've
got to know some history."

Back Up Digital with Analog

Some sources are worried that some vault executives with
otherwise admirable plans for archiving might not be proceeding cautiously
enough when dealing with the new-generation methods of digital storage.

"You've got to remember that digital tapes, DATs
and especially the U-Matic tapes that are common now for production masters,
have real thin tape--like the tape in your VCR-- that's apt to curl or warp
and get misaligned over time. So they might not track in a straight line.
So what happens--knock on plastic--if all these R-DATS and U-Matics don't
work so hot in a few years? What if they haven't been transfered to CD Rom
or some other backup?

"So some are thinking about a new system now where
everything will be automatically copied robotically every two years on a
rotating basis. That's great, but say there's just a dust speck of distortion
introduced. Sometime up the line, say, tenth generation, God knows what
they might find on those tapes--maybe they'll be okay or maybe the distortion's
magnified or encrypted something beyond what their computers can deal with.
Could be fine, could be half-shot, could be all gibberish."

Another engineer argued that such systems will have built-in safeguards, even allowing changes of carriers (formats) as they become standardized
and are replaced - say from U-Matic to disc to even some version of hard
drive storage.

The three main recording/archivist groups still say the
safest storage format for modern tape-era recordings is not digital, but
analog tape.

The American Engineering Society (AES), the Assn. For Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC) and the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS), in their recommendations for storage and preservation
of sound recordings, all conclude that because analog tape has been proven
to last, generally, and because the shelf life of digital tape is unknown,
recordings should be stored--or backed up, at least-- in the analog tape
format.

"Anybody who doesn't back up their digital masters
with analog could be making a big mistake," said one leading archivist,
"At least you know for sure analog tape has lasted 30, 40 years.

At this writing, the major label companies have taken
different approaches to archival storage, but most have programs to back
up heriotage material in both digital and analog formats.

At BMG, for example, a spokesman said that "we're
starting out by archiving with digital and analog on 'fragile material'
first." Sony, according to a vault official, makes digital and analog
safeties "only on post-tape era recordings," with the reasoning
that acetate (or metal parts) transfers to digital are preferable to a three
step process that includes a tape copy.

Warner Brothers archives its mostly-tape library only
in the digital domain, but in two configurations--U-Matic and CDR (recordable
CD).

One label, PolyGram, however, made a decision nearly two
years ago to back up its entire archive on analog tape alone, rather than
both digital and analog, based on the concern that digital storage and format
choices are volatile, and that digital copies could turn out not to have
a long shelf life. Blank tape cost for the ongoing project is estimated
at $4 million (Billboard, Sept. 3, 1994).

There is also a feeling throughout the engineering side of the industry that the future manufacture and availability of high quality analog tape is itself an open question, according to sources. Several well-known
tape manufacturers have already gone out of the tape business.

Overall, archivists at the major labels face what they
see as an uncertain future.

"It's been shown that the best system doesn't always
win the marketplace approval," said a source. "Take the Beta vs.
VCR race. The same thing applies to some digital storage format choices
already, the Sony U-Matic vs. the Mitsubishi system, for example. And no
matter what the salesmen say, they can't tell you for sure what's going
to happen in the future with any of these things."

"We know only one thing for sure," said a veteran
archivist. "We know that discs, vinyl and shellac discs have lasted
a long, long time. Remember, those Caruso records have been around since
the turn of the century. Basically, they're inert. They ain't going anywhere.
I'm not sure about anything else--nobody can be."